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Excerpted from African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire,
Chapters 6 and 7, by Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, AMNH and
University of Washington Press, 1990.
The Mangbetu Art of Daily Life
The peoples of northeast Congo manufactured the most ordinary
tools and utensils with skill and with an eye for beauty. Fine craftsmanship
was valued in the construction of virtually all household objects,
and modern informants tell us that the care given to the appearance
of an object was to make it beautiful and to show the intelligence
of the creator. Many useful objects served as ornaments when first
made and as implements when they were older. The best brooms, for
example, were used first in dances, where they were held in the
air as wands, and later for sweeping. People demonstrated their
wealth and position by the fine decoration on their utilitarian
possessions. Spears, knives, and even shields were worn or held
as ornaments. Toothbrushes and drinking straws were sometimes wrapped
with ornamental copper wire. Fly whisks had carved wooden or ivory
handles and, for high-status people, were wrapped with copper, brass,
or iron wire.
The Art of Adornment
Many of the ethnographic objects collected by Lang and Chapin
were designed for adorning the bodies of their owners. These objects
include finely carved ivory and forged metal hairpins, woven and
feathered hats, belts, and elaborately designed jewelry made of
glass, plant and animal parts, iron, and copper. The Mangbetu also
sometimes wore or carried bark cloth ornamented with free-flowing
graphic designs and thicker back aprons made from banana leaves
used to cover their buttocks. Each of these objects was made with
great attention to quality as well as a keen awareness of style
and aesthetic effect.
The art of adornment among the Mangbetu and related peoples is
closely tied to notions of health and well-being, and it is difficult
to describe many of the objects that people wear or apply to their
bodies without discussing notions of human development and health.
Although beauty was certainly of concern, most adornments were worn
to protect the person, enhance some personal quality, or influence
the outcome of an activity. The Mangbetu were known for their striking
treatment of the body, particularly head elongation, body-painting,
scarification, and the wearing of the decorative back apron, but
these elements represented only a minor part of what was important
to them. More than anything else, they were concerned with obtaining
and wearing objects that protected and improved their lives.
Houses
In 1910, both mud-walled and reed houses were in fashion, and Lang
commented on the great variety of reed patterns. The most spectacular
reed building was a Great Hall that Lang himself commissioned a
year before. Two other forms of house decoration were important
at that time: sculptured house posts and murals. House posts often
had geometric designs cut into them, and some of the surfaces were
burnished or blackened with dark mud, forming the same pattern of
alternating light and dark tones found on many implements throughout
the region. Lang wrote of house poles:
They never have two poles alike in any house. Very often there
are only two, sometimes four or more. They are nearly always split
lengthwise [to support crossbeams]. The poles are cut only with
the adze and no knife is used for carving any portion of them. Before
they work on them they let the poles soak in water for one or two
days. It takes an experienced worker about a day to finish a pole
if it has been previously soaked and peeled.
At the turn of the century, mural painting was common throughout
the Mangbetu region. The most spectacular Mangbetu mural painting
was found north of the Bomokandi River, where many people decorated
the exteriors of their houses with paintings of animals, people,
and geometric designs. Mural painting may well have resulted from
contact with grassland peoples such as the Matchaga and Bangba in
the last half of the nineteenth century, when the shift from woven
reed to mud walls began. Geometric designs in the nineteenth century
may have been copies of earlier ones executed in raffia on walls
and mats.
In many parts of the region, Lang photographed houses decorated
with both representational paintings depicting encounters between
Europeans and Africans and geometric designs. The houses in King
Okondo's village that Lang photographed were decorated with fine
geometric patterns, painted in red and black. The designs resemble
the diamond and checker-board patterns found on many Mangbetu objects,
from arrowheads to incised pottery, as well as the woven patterns
of mats and baskets. Lang's fieldnotes and Chapin's watercolor sketches
of the walls in Okondo's village noted the symmetry of the patterns.
But Lang also photographed wall paintings in non-Mangbetu villages
of the region. These photographs suggest that at this period of
Zande and Makere wall designs were more free-flowing than the Mangbetu
patterns.
Tools
Lang's colorful and detailed descriptions of productive technology
are still applicable to Mangbetu life, despite the introduction
of money and imported goods. Many of Lang's most detailed observations
of technology were made in 1910-11 during his first period of serious
ethnographic collecting. These notes (up to note number 804) were
made among the Meje people living in villages near the government
post of Medje. Although the decorative patterns on tools and finished
objects varied among the different peoples of the region, their
basic technology was similar.
Agricultural work was performed with simple tools, including a
large assortment of iron tools and baskets. Most of the tools used
for work were decorated, and some, especially knives, were worn
as ornaments first and relegated to mundane work when they were
older--after they were, literally, worn. Lang described one ordinary,
general-purpose knife, called nede for women:
Most of the ever varying and difficult plantation work is done
with these knives. They cut down brush, high grass, bananas, clear
roads and work the soil, [the knife is] used specially for planting
bananas, manioc, corn, etc. With these knives, they also dig holes
into the ground out of which they take the moist soil to build the
elevated platform of their huts. Women carry the better kind of
these knives also during dances and visits, for show-purposes only,
very often they exchange them on a friendly scale for a similar
knife.
Some knives were specifically for men or women, but others could
be used by both. Many tools had multiple uses. The hoe, called negede,
was used, according to Lang, for plantation work, clearing roads,
and building houses. The heavy knife (emodu), used by men
for heavy plantation work such as putting young banana plants in
newly established forest clearings, also served to cut grooves in
the ivory or bone hammers that were used to beat bark for barkcloth.
The axe (nombi) was used to cut trees to make clearings for
new plantations, to chop firewood, and to cut trees, sticks, and
grasses for building houses.
They use these axes with remarkable dexterity and they are much
more efficient than the small axes of white men. The handle is called
nambieme and is used for diverse purposes, especially as
a pestle in their small wooden mortars, to crush cooked bananas·.
[It] is also used for hitting sticks [to remove the bark], to beat
the ground to even it or harden the floor of huts, etc. The axe
(iron piece) they also considered as some sort of money which is
in common use.
Tools were so important to productive technology that they had
the value of currency, here as elsewhere in central Africa. According
to Lang, in 1910 a metal axe blade with a decorated wooden handle
was equivalent to one heavy brass ring :
Iron and brass knives, spearheads, hatchets, etc. are much appreciated
objects of wealth. They never are kept in their huts but hidden
in the ground or in the brooks and rivers, these places being known
only to their owners and after their death are in most cases lost.
Women went to the fields with large carrying baskets hung over
their shoulders and from their foreheads, and came back laden with
bananas and wild plants, including forest leaves, roots, tubers,
and mushrooms, as well as termites and other insects. The collecting
activities of men ranged further afield. Using many different kinds
of traps they caught guinea fowl, pigeons, rails, thrushes, other
small birds, and all kinds of rats. Lang writes: "Very often they
clear a place in a plantation of four to eight yards square, put
some food on the ground and lay out a number of traps until the
whole place is covered. They may catch five to seven guinea fowls
out of one flock."
Besides using traps, men hunted with snares, pitfalls, bows and
arrows, spears, and nets. Much hunting was done at the beginning
of the dry season, when the Mangbetu would set the tall grass on
fire in deliberate patterns designed to draw animals into view.
Whole herds of elephants were sometimes trapped in the flame and
smoke. Men particularly enjoyed hunting in groups with nets and
dogs, a technique the Mangbetu say they borrowed from the Azande
in the nineteenth century. The men who owned the nets strung them
end to end along a horse-shoe-shaped track. They hid with spears
while a dog owner took his dog to the open end of the horseshoe.
The dogs, of a barkless breed, wore a wooden bell around the neck
and were specially trained to drive animals into the nets where
the men could spear them. The largest portions of meat went to the
owners of the dogs and nets, to the man who organized the hunt,
and to the man who speared the animal.
Ornamentation was important on all kinds of tools, including the
metal blades and wooden, ivory, or metal handles of knives, axes,
hoes, and spears. Wooden arrow shafts had fine patterns cut into
them that produced alternate facets of light and dark surfaces.
There was also a great variety of metal points. Arrow shaft patterns
seem to correlate with the purpose and design of arrow points. The
shaft decorations are incised, allowing the hunter to select the
arrow he wants by feeling the pattern on the shaft.
Ceramics
Domestic pottery used for cooking and serving was made in a wide
range of forms and patterns (See Schildkrout, Hellman, and Keim
1989). Most pots served multiple purposes. Lang writes:
The large pot (nembwo) serves general purposes, such
as taking water from rivers to cook vegetable food, for toilet purposes,
or as a receptacle for water. The water for cooking, drinking, and
toilet purposes is usually taken in the middle of a river. Such
work is performed only by women, who carry the pot on one of their
shoulders. They rarely carry a jar on their head on account of the
elaborate hairdress.<.p>
Pots were made by the coil method and fired over an open fire.
Surface designs were applied with the hands or with small tools,
including shell scrapers and wooden roulettes. The incised patterns,
the depressions worked into surface design, and the baskets made
to fit around pots were functional as well as decorative; they prevented
pots without handles from slipping. Pots with handles and long necks
held liquids that were drunk through straws. Lang collected a wide
assortment of pottery-making tools and described how Meje women
made pottery:
All women know how to make the ordinary jars, but the more elaborate
ones are made by women who are experts in this line. The decorations
of the ordinary pots and jars are made by a mechanical device. The
negative of the desired pattern is cut in such a manner into a piece
of wood, that rolling it over the white soft clay it produces a
pattern. Other devices are regular dies into the end of which the
pattern is cut; or fibers are strung together in such a way that
in rolling them over the still soft clay they leave the desired
decoration. Much of this work is done by hand or has to be adjusted
afterwards·. They are blackened afterwards over the fire. The Mangbetu
have an abundance and attach a small value to the ordinary kind.
Utilitarian pots found throughout the region were decorated, more
or less elaborately. Pottery styles spread throughout the area,
with the highly burnished complex forms of the north spreading southward
from Niangara. Mangbetu, Zande, and Barambo pots of this period
had many similarities in form and surface design, suggesting that
styles, potters, or the pottery itself were spreading throughout
the region. Lang collected pots from all these peoples with similar
multi-chambered forms and highly burnished black surfaces, textured
by incising and finger pressure.
What Lang described as "art pottery"--a category that undoubtedly
included anthropomorphic pottery--was found, in his day, mostly
in the region around Niangara, where there was a great deal of interethnic
contact. The cosmopolitanism of Niangara, along with the impact
of the new [European] patrons, contributed to the efflorescence
of anthropomorphic potters that occurred in this period. Others
found a great elaboration of pottery shapes among the Mangbetu in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but it was not until
Lang's time that Mangbetu anthropomorphic pottery was described
or collected. The anthropomorphic pots that Lang collected, first
in Niangara (1910) and later in Medje (1914), included examples
that were virtually identical in shape and surface design to the
long-necked water jars made at the same time, and probably earlier,
suggesting that the head was added as an embellishment to an already
accepted form.
Fiber and Gourd Objects
The Mangbetu widely exploited their environment to obtain an array
of fabrication materials that when subjected to their inventive
technical expertise yielded items of utility and beauty. The types
of plants collected for basketry objects included grasses from swamp
areas, fibers from food crops such as sorghum, millet, and bananas,
the fibers from oil and raffia palm plants, rattan, papyrus, and
vines. All parts of the plants were used. For example, the bark
of the fig tree was used to make barkcloth; split leaf sections,
particularly of the raffia and oil palms, were used to make baskets
and cordage; mid-ribs of oil palm leaves were used as instrument
strings; palm stalks, whole or in sections, were used to make furniture;
split stem materials of all kinds had wide use as binding, tying,
and wrapping materials, as well as serving as foundation elements
for basketry of all types. The Mangbetu used these plant parts in
their natural color and also dyed them red or black.
Woven basketry techniques were used to create baskets, mats, hats,
shields, rattles, and cordage. The primary techniques used were
plaiting and twining. An incredible variety of patterns was possible
using these two basic weaves. With twill plaiting (a weaving technique
in which all fibers are active elements) diamond, checkerboard,
cross, striped, lozenge, and zigzag designs were achieved. Twining
(a technique employing stationary warp and active weft elements)
was commonly used to make basket and hat rims, rattles, and, by
the Azande, sturdy shields. Floated fibers were utilized within
a plaited ground to add further design variation, particularly in
creating motifs that stand out from the overall field. Combinations
of dyed and undyed fibers further enhanced pattern variations. Placement
of the fiber's glossy cuticle layer facing up or facing down was
another artistic choice for augmenting an object's visual effect.
Both regular and asymmetric designs were achieved using all of the
above techniques.
Supplementary fibers were used to elaborate the designs of woven
structures. Wrapped loops on hats and edgings on hat rims were constructed
of elements that were not essential to the integrity of the woven
structure. The sides of baskets often had nonstructural fibers inserted
through the plaited foundation. These additions, as well as being
decorative, may provide extra strength to a basket, allowing it
to hold heavier items without sagging. Supplemental overlays of
fibers--on quivers, for example--may also have served as reinforcement,
but they were clearly applied in such a way as to also create a
decorative effect.
Straps for baskets, stools, shields, musical instruments, and pots
were made using a single-element looping technique. Plaited overlays
were added to wooded or ceramic objects, such as the plain weave
bands used on the borders of rectangular wooden shields and the
open-latticework basketry constructed over jars. Such plaiting was
used for reinforcement, to provide a grip, as a repair, or for decoration.
Further embellishment of plaited objects was common. Various decorations,
often signifying status, were attached to hats. Animal hides were
used not only for straps but were also attached to shields as talismans.
Fine baskets were treasured and upper-class women had better ones
than other women. A bride's family gave her decorated household
items, especially pots and baskets, when she moved to her husband's
compound. In addition to these items, household furnishings included
carved wooden bowls, made with or without covers and with or without
handles; stools carved from a single piece of wood, used by women;
stools and beds made from palm stalks; bamboo drinking straws, sometimes
decorated with brass or copper wire; and by the early colonial period,
steamer chairs, used mainly outside the house by important men.
Wood Carving and Metalwork
In many cases carvers were also blacksmiths, for in addition to
making the blades of knives, adzes, axes, spears, and hoes, they
fashioned the wood handles that held them. Lang wrote in his fieldnotes
that the "famous stools (nobarra)," carved from a single
piece of wood, used by the Mangbetu women were made by special
artists who enjoy a wide reputation. They sign their work on the
lower end by a mark deeply cut into the wood and rubbed, usually
with redwood powder, which is an expression of good wishes for a
future owner. These stools accompany their owners (women only),
on their visits and voyages and wherever they go. The strap fastened
through the hole (in the rear) is laid over the forehead, the stool
hanging down the back, the seat against the skin. Sometimes also
the strap is laid upon the right or left shoulder, the stool hanging
down the side. Important chiefs' women have a special woman to carry
the stool behind them. They are surprisingly light.
Only the stools of the most important women were decorated with
metal studs, but all the women attached to a chief's household,
including the chief's mother, wives, sisters, and daughters, had
finely carved stools. They were an integral part of one court dance
in which the women, seated in a great circle on their stools, with
their knees together and their feet apart, moved up and down with
the rhythm of the drums. Although men did not sit on the small blackened
stools made for women, several Mangbetu chiefs had a large double
version that enabled the seated chief to remain taller than his
female attendants. Today stools are rare and wood carving in general
seems to have declined for all but the most necessary implements
like axe and adze handles.
Two items of furniture were especially important for chiefs. One
was a bench made from the midribs of palm fronds with slats of slit
bamboo. German botanist Georg Schweinfurth's drawing of Mbunza shows
him seated on just such a bench. These benches were made in many
sizes; some had long extensions so that they could serve as litters,
like the one Lang collected and photographed with Chief Okondo's
wife, Nenzima, upon it. The other item of furniture was the backrest
placed behind the bench and decorated with brass studs or copper
wire.
The Mangbetu were well known in the region for their skill as blacksmiths
and carvers, and the best carvers were often also smiths. Iron in
the form of tools and weapons or in chunks directly from the smelting
furnace was highly prized, and anyone who worked with iron had a
special status. Smiths often became rich men because families would
bring them their daughters to marry with the expectation of receiving
iron and ironworking services as bridewealth.
Smelters were distinct from smiths. According to modern informants
the ritual of smelting excluded women and in the case of the king's
double bell [a court instrument and key symbol of a chief's authority
involved human sacrifice and cannibalism. Mangbetu bellows were
made of wood covered with banana leaves and were used in sets of
four (Zande bellows were covered with hide). Smelters had to abstain
from sexual intercourse before beginning to smelt and were assisted
by a naando practitioner, who would chew the naando
root and sing the sacred songs that would ensure a successful result.
Blacksmiths made spear blades, harpoon points, arrow points, adzes,
axes, hammers in many sizes, as well as metal ornaments. Originally
working only in iron, wood, and ivory they extended their repertoire
in the nineteenth century to include brass and copper. The fact
that the same artisans were working in many materials accounts in
part for the variety of substances used to produce very similar
objects. Hairpins were made of ivory, wood, iron, and copper; boxes
with almost identical heads--almost certainly made by the same carver--were
made of bark, ivory, and wood; knife and spear handles were made
most often of wood but sometimes of iron; and pendants were made
in copper, brass, and iron in the form of canine teeth. In the early
colonial period the idea of rendering an object in a novel material
was applied to traditional objects, like hunting bows, and to new
kinds of objects, like European forks and spoons. These nonfunctional
objects were made purely for the purpose of being admired as art.
(Schildkrout, Enid, Jill Hellman, and Curtis A. Keim.
1989. "Mangbetu Pottery: Tradition and Innovation in Northeast Zaire."
African Arts 22 (2): 38-47.)
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